I don’t want to go into a whole lot of detail here, and I generally respect that people are afraid. He makes some good points, and I even agree that the outlook is bleak, and that most happy “a new tool democratizing art!” outcries don’t project far enough ahead, because this thing is moving fast. But towards the end this stood out for me:
We must not permit AI developers, with all their underhanded techniques, to undermine us until we are ultimately supplanted. We must fight back–otherwise, we set a dangerous precedent for all AI systems to come.
We’re long past the precedent-setting stage.
All of a sudden he’s concerned, and just about how AI affects artists? He hasn’t noticed that all along, for generations, technology has been used to exploit and supplant people? He missed that automation has already been making massive inroads in manufacturing, for decades? That AI systems have already replaced people other than artists? Oh, that’s ok because those jobs are “rote and miserable”? Only fun and joyful professions need to be protected (as if all art-related jobs were fun and joyful)? All the tools he has previously happily used (he protests loudly that he is not a Luddite), they also all cost some people their livelihood. Where was his impassioned outcry? It’s AI researchers (underhanded!) who’re at fault, not the system that always puts profit over people, or the people championing it and getting filthy rich off the labours of us peons? As if AI companies run by hedge fun managers were the first and only. I mean, it’s good he’s now paying attention, but he’s only seeing part of the picture.
In a democracy, your voice matters. In a world flooded by AI media, your voice has no chance of being heard.
As if our voices mattered now in that sense. (And we don’t even have actual democracies.) In a sea of billions of people our individual voices get drowned out already, how could it be otherwise? Only our friends listen to us, maybe some relatives, and small circles of acquaintances. Unless we become famous. The vast majority of people never experience even those misattributed Warholian 15 minutes. We eke out what importance we feel from the few people we can reach personally. Contrary to Mr Zapata I don’t see that changing. I will watch my friend’s animation over any AI-produced work just like I now read my friends’ books, put my friends’ art on my walls, and enjoy my friends’ music. No, that won’t make them a living, but most of them don’t make one with their art now. But it’s what I have control over. We all do.
The main thing that he seems upset about is that artists aren’t getting paid for their art being used to train AI systems. I have bad news for him: even if they were, that would in no way prevent the inexorable march towards replacement, and the few pennies the average artist might get if by some chance AI training will end up paying for the data, won’t keep food on anyone’s table.
It just seems like a whole lot of hostility directed entirely at the wrong people. Yelling at artists who’re embracing the new tool because they feel that gives them a better chance at survival than not doing so is … weird when he isn’t also yelling at artists who might sell their art to AI companies for training. And conflating AI researchers and the people running companies who’re pushing the hype seems also misplaced. For somebody excoriating everyone disagreeing with him as shortsighted, he’s weirdly shortsighted about where the responsibility lies, and whom we’d have to tackle, and how.
l that’s a good one, I needed that chuckle this morning 
